Lionel Messi not just better than most, he is smarter too! Inter Miami superstar has ‘gifted intellectual capabilities’ that allow him to make opponents look foolish

The Argentine icon, who is now playing his club football at MLS side Inter Miami, has made a career out of making opponents look foolish. That is because he is more talented than them, with his dancing feet allowing a record-setting haul of honours to be collected – including four Champions League crowns and eight Ballons d’Or.

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The speed at which Messi’s brain works is considered to make him special in both sporting and intellectual terms, with the 36-year-old able to weigh up situations in an instant before deciding what the best approach is to take.

Jana Martinez-Piqueras, who is a specialist on gifted capabilities and the president of Indifferent Minds, has told Marca of a unique South American character: “Yes, it is believed that Messi can be [considered] a person with a high intellectual capacity. Historically these people have always been associated with a number, a test result, a high IQ. But this is a completely obsolete paradigm. At the level of science, it is no longer sustainable. It's clear that he has multiple cognitive abilities combined. And then there is the most important thing: Messi, like people with highly gifted capacities, changes the environment in which he intervenes. If anyone thinks that everything Messi did on the pitch is because he rotates his ankle very well, they are wrong. There are a lot of athletes with high ability that go undetected, excellent athletes who have not been taught the cognitive part. And what you don't work on, becomes extinct.”

Messi has honed his skill set over many years, allowing him to reach the very top of the game. There is no sign of him slowing down in the United States and he may yet emulate evergreen rival Cristiano Ronaldo by playing on towards his 40s.